


The Burning Gods

by reylomancy



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Middle East, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angst, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Slow Burn, desert witch Rey of Jakku, gods and demons, lapsed sea god Ben Solo, something like a Force Bond
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-07 08:46:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14667507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylomancy/pseuds/reylomancy
Summary: "You're a child of the goddess of burning sands. You have magic at your fingers, demons beneath your skin, and fire in your heart. You could be more than my equal."Mythology AU, in which Rey is a desert witch desperate to find water for her people, and Ben is the lapsed sea god she decides she is going to summon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is loosely inspired by the ancient Middle East/Mesopotamian mythology. I'll get around to making some mood boards on tumblr eventually, and I'll include links to some vocab that may be unfamiliar as it comes up, if that helps. Rating/tags/character roster will likely update as we go.

They say she is a witch. They say the goddess of the burning sands birthed her, and all the demons of the desert live beneath her gold-flecked skin. They burn their dead on piled-stone pyres, to keep her from scavenging the bodies for her tinctures. They burn her scraggly grove of date palms once, her storehouse tarred with bitumen twice. They burn her, and her mother the desert burns them. A vicious cycle, the people of Jakku call it.

Her name is Rey. As in ray of sun. It may seem pleasant enough anywhere else, but it is an ugly name in the desert, a harsh cruel name for a harsh cruel witch. It is like naming a child Pain, or Death, or Fear. Burning Heat. Hateful Thing. Rey.

The villagers are wrong to think she wishes to scavenge their dead though, and they’re likely wrong about her mother too. Rey doesn’t know whose daughter she is, but she doubts any connection to the goddess of burning sands. After all, Rey knows no filial privilege—her feet burn and her lips crack and her thirst is constant, same as all of Jakku. The only demons she knows to sleep in her bones are loneliness and fear and anger and emptiness. Hardly ones befitting a girl named for the fierceness of the sun.

Same as all of Jakku, she also avoids her namesake, working mornings and evenings in her storehouse, when the desert is finally cool enough to withstand her magic fires. She spends her days sleeping fitfully, one ear always trained to listen for the shifting of footsteps above the howling desert winds. Her storehouse is full of myrrh and pickled olives and crushed barley—no hearts or teeth or nails. Not that the villagers listen long enough for her to tell them so.

Loneliness is probably Rey’s most vicious demon, the one whose claws she thinks she may really and truly feel dragging against her skin. Hunger may carve out her belly until her bones jut like the rocky spine of the Carbon Ridge in the distance, but there are always figs to eat and milk to drink. There is nothing to take for loneliness, no tonic or brew to swallow. She knows, she’s tried.

* * *

The sky is dark as a bruise, the air thick with ozone instead of dust for once. Rey sits patiently in the open doorway of her sleeping hut, a deep clay jug balanced between her knobby knees. She watches as the storm breaks over the Carbon Ridge, the sky that spreads over its peaks running dark as wine. She chants a prayer that the rains hold out until the clouds reach Jakku.

They don’t.

* * *

They call her a witch, and a dangerous one, but Rey considers herself mediocre. She can summon only a handful of useful things out of the sand—barley, fire, a healing wind, and once, a staff that glows like coals at night—and a whole slew of unwanted things—thorns, scorpions, bones that whisper to each other, a thick smoke that will refuse to dissipate.

There is no spell she knows to summon those things she truly wants, those things she suspects one day she will fall down dead for want of if she never gets them, same as food or water. Family. Friends. Belonging. Love.

She has tried calming salves to sooth the anxiety of the villagers she manages to corner, clay masks that are charmed to disguise her. Nothing works. Nothing is permanent enough. She despairs each time she chisels a mark into the wall above her bed, a line for every failed attempt. The marks look down on her like the night sky as she sleeps, the enormity of her shortcomings pressing down on her.

There is one spell Rey will not give up on though, no matter how heavily it weighs on her every night to carve the mark of the day’s failure above her head.

She will summon a water god, and bind him to this place, so Jakku can finally have the rain it needs to flourish. She will put the demons beneath her skin to good use. She will set herself on fire if she must. She will chase the belonging she craves across these burning sands, if she has to.

* * *

A full cycle of the moon has finished, and Rey sits again at her open door, the same empty jug clasped between her legs as she watches another storm release itself just outside her reach. The sweetness of the rain on the wind is a taunt and nothing more as Rey watches the clouds drizzle until they are empty. When the sun is shining all around her again, quickly burning off the petrichor and any hint of dampness, she clambers angrily to her feet. The clay pot shatters against the mudbrick exterior of the hut, the pieces instantly sinking into the sand.

Rey begins to pack.

 

She leaves most of the collection in her storehouse behind, taking only the things she will miss if the men burn down her hut a third time in her absence. A bit of frankincense she was able to trade for with Maz Kenata’s caravan, before the villagers managed to poison most of the merchants against her. A bronze knife with arabesques carved in the handle, given to her by Maz herself as a parting gift last her caravan had passed through. Her glowing staff; though she summoned it from the sands herself, she has never been able to create its like.

There is no one to tell, to bid farewell, when she leaves on the three day’s journey for the Carbon Ridge.

* * *

The heady wine color of the jagged peaks fades to an ordinary brown just a few shades darker than the golden sands as Rey gets closer—a trick of the horizon, no doubt. Her footsteps have become easier, stronger, taking her farther than she could have ever imagined; desert rat that she is, she’s never had the privilege of crossing ground that’s packed hard beneath her legs. Her footfalls feel strangely solid, her teeth ringing in her head with the impact of each step, and she grins, feeling surer of herself than she ever has.

 

The land that lies against the base of the Carbon Ridge is etched with wadis, their patterns as complex and spreading as the arabesques on Rey’s knife. She walks straight down the belly of one, a spell for wind tucked under her tongue and another for earth pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The wadis are known for their flash floods this time of year, and she will need breath in her lungs and a steady patch of ground if she is going to survive against one of those brutal, whipping currents.

Rey is watchful of flooding, but she can’t help but notice how dry the wadi seems around its edges, how there is scarcely any green in it to cut the neverending tumble of brown and gray stones that stretches below her feet. She can feel the earth spell thrumming in her hand, its power strong with no water beneath the ground to interfere.

Rey keeps to the path, hums a prayer for the land as she goes.

* * *

The wadi leads Rey right to the sea. She could cry at the sight of so much water before her, and takes off running toward its edge without a second thought.

She stops just short of the water’s warm, lapping reach. Her feet are stinging as they slap against the pristine, crystalline white shore, stinging with so much pain she must stop. Rey lowers herself to the ground, flinches at the sharpness that meets her hands. This beautiful white beach is not soft and loose, like her desert, but coarse and hard as the mountains between which it is nestled. She lifts one foot to examine, and watches as drops of her blood slowly drip down onto the white dust below, blooming like strange vibrant flowers. While the cuts bleed, Rey finds they are not deep. And yet they suffer from a sting that rivals that of venom, the pain burning hot and high until it sends tears into Rey’s eyes. She can taste the salt as they run over her cheeks to catch in her cracked lips. Her lips sting too.

Dread of this place has started to gather cold and heavy in Rey’s chest. She lowers her fingers to scrabble in the pale dust, then brings them to her lips and tastes them. It’s salt dusting her hands. Salt in her wounds.

It’s _all_ somehow salt, she learns, once she chants the ingredients in her satchel into a salve for her feet and continues onward. The shore, the sea. The rocks are crusted with it, the barren wadi is no doubt laced with it. Everything about this place resonates wrong with Rey’s bones. To her, to everyone else in Jakku, water is life. To be confronted with this sea of… of death, it shakes Rey to her core.

She begins to wonder whether she hunts a god, or a monster.

* * *

Despite the deep-seated feeling of wrongness this place has about it, Rey persists. She takes a day to build herself a sleeping hut stacked out of rocks, searches for a charm that will spin her new bowls from the dark mud that rims the shoreline. It takes her a few tries—she isn’t used to working with wet material. When the bowls are done, she fills them with everything she can find that gives off even a whisper of magic about it. She takes endless, endless bowls of water and mud and dried salt. When she finds the barren shoreline lacking, she scales the cliffs that hem in the sea, where she gathers strange stones and thin weeds and even a few round bird eggs. She takes her own blood from when she slips on the wet rocks at the shoreline and cuts herself on the sharp formations of dried salt before it. She takes rainwater she finds in creases within the cliffs, for both magic and drinking. The rest of the wine she has traveled with must go to the god of this strange place, when she is ready to offer to it.

 

The moon has completed a quarter cycle before Rey decides she may as well begin courting this god, if it is even still alive. It takes her three days to select good stones of power, two more to stack them into a small temple lined with cairns and seal it all with mud. She decorates the dried mud floor with thick crystals of salt, in patterns meant to look like the swirling, criss-crossing wadis. She makes many, many more bowls, fills them with salt and sea and rainwater. After some deliberation, she adds a few bowls of the fire she so expertly conjures as well. Fire and water may be opposing elements, but a sea would not be threatened by her meager flames. Surely a god would take the reminder of its might as flattery?

She sleeps in her hut, across the beach from the temple, and watches her flames flicker in the gaps between the cairns at night while she counts down the many subtle shapes of the moon. She is waiting for a moon-less sky and a low tide, so she might have some chance of defending herself against what she hunts, should things go badly.

* * *

When the night comes, she bathes naked in the sea below the stars and the darkened moon, lets her golden feet cake with mud and salt as she walks to the temple. She leaves her dark hair unbound and wavy with dried salt spray, her body free of the loose, flowing garments that belong to the desert and its burning sands.

Rey sings as she makes her offerings, her voice low and thick with the sea air as she gathers her bowls. She feeds the god’s ego first, pouring a brackish mixture of rain and sea water out over a handful of rocks and a jumping fire. Rey jerks at the hot steam that rises up to fill the temple with a sharp hiss as the flames try to resist their demise.

She feeds its belly next, mixes the last of her wine into a second bowl of the brackish concoction, stirs it with her fingers and watches as the clear water quickly darkens.

Last of all, she feeds that fearful godly appetite, that dark insistence all divines seem to share for pain and sacrifice, that inhuman craving not for meat or fat, but bone and blood. Into this third bowl of waters, Rey allows her own blood to drip, from a wound across her arm inflicted by Maz’s bronze knife.

She may as well give it a taste for her flesh now, if she is going to bind this thing to her, Rey thinks.

She is hardly faint-hearted, but she feels her head begin to spin at the smell of wine and blood and brine that thickens the wet warm air inside the temple. Her pulse starts pounding in her ears, and Rey swears the mud in the walls begins to weep, but she sings until she feels her eyes flutter shut.

* * *

She awakens to sunset on the cliffs overlooking the sea: her favorite time of day in this foreboding place that feels alive yet dead (her desert is the opposite: bleak looking, but oh what things pulse beneath the surface).

Rey is startled to find she is not alone here.

A man sits near the cliff’s edge, huddled in on himself, arms crossed around his knees as his eyes track the sun’s steady descent. Despite his crouched posture, Rey can tell he is long limbed and powerfully built, yet with an apparent air of grace to his sinews.

He doesn’t seem to see her standing alongside him, as he looks straight on. He’s beautiful, Rey realizes with a sick throb of her heart. His skin is nearly as pale white as the shore, his thick wavy hair as richly dark as the sea’s mud. His eyes are a complicated sort of brown, muddy, yet with something clear and bright to them that reminds Rey of the horizon he watches now, his chin balanced on his arms.

Rey lets out a shaky breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and his face—somehow sharp, yet also soft—snaps to her. His plush lips are rosy with the sunset and parted in surprise as he looks at her for the first time, and Rey’s heart flutters in her chest as she absurdly decides that she’d love to kiss this absolute stranger.

In an instant, his soft, open expression hardens into a scowl, and the sunset blots out behind a sudden rumbling swirl of thunderclouds. His pale skin takes on a cold, dead sheen that nearly mirrors the white-blue lightning that rips and tears across the sky.

Rey swallows hard, but there are no spells stashed beneath her tongue to help her now. In fact, her magic feels strangely dead in this place. She can’t feel anything but him, she realizes with a jolt.

 _He_ has risen to his feet—she was right, he’s as tall as a godling—and his hands are strangely cold as they grip her naked shoulders. The wind is shrieking around them now, and when he speaks the words he grits them through his pale, clenched jaw. Yet somehow, his low-pitched voice finds Rey’s ears.

“Leave. Me. Alone.”

And with no further preamble, he tosses her over the edge of the cliff, into the wind-raged sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [bitumen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt)   
>  [Carbon Ridge](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Carbon_Ridge)   
>  [wadi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi)
> 
> I'm hoping to be quick in updating this one, since this first chapter is only a fraction of what I currently have written, but I'm trash, so we shall see!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a hack, so have some Greco-Roman influences in this chapter~~~

Rey wakes up in a panic and choking on spray. She’s back in the temple, which has gone pitch dark without the light of a fire, and freezing cold. Her teeth nearly clatter too hard to speak the spell to realight her bowls, and as soon as she is successful, a sea-drenched gale quickly undoes her efforts anyway.

She darts outside, and her jaw slackens with shock. The tide has eaten up the shore until it nearly reaches the doorway to the temple. A howling wind buffets her face with salt spray lifted from churning waves that are mere steps away. Overhead, the sky has opened up in a colossal torrent.

Teeth chattering and naked skin tender with gooseflesh, Rey sprints for her hut, before what few possessions she has here are flooded out and carried off to sea. She swears the wind picks up as she runs, as if it is racing her there, and she chews on a spell of air to keep her light-footed across the slippery rocks.

She gets there just in time to salvage a change of clothes and her staff. She can smell her herbs and poultices as they mingle with the flood waters, can hear the crack of the stones behind her as the hut collapses into the powerful encroaching waves. Rey is already running for the cliffs.

She spends the night wedged into a crease high up on the rocks, struggling to keep a magical flame going for long enough to dry out while the world rages in diluvian chaos below. No louder than the chattering of her own teeth in her head, the sea, the storm, the sodden, rioting wind itself all seem to howl.

_leave me alone_

* * *

Rey waits on the cliffs for two days, but the waters don’t recede. On the third day, she finally decides there is nothing else to do but take the only wadi she can access from her perch, a steep-walled canyon with just a trickle running at the bottom that slowly turns from salty to brackish to fresh the longer she follows it north. It’s a difficult journey without any food stores to supplement the water she scoops from the creases of the stones underfoot, but Rey is hardy, and her efforts are rewarded when she reaches a settlement just before nightfall on the second day.

She is not known in this village, and the people are kind to her with an earnestness that makes her heart ache. She refrains from magic while she is there, to stretch the people’s good graces, but their goodwill begins to wither once she starts asking after the salt sea and the chaotic thing that guards it.

The only one who will discuss it with Rey is a gruff old farmer, who takes a liking to her but pretends he hasn’t. She milks his goats for him while he rests on a stool and fiddles with her staff. If he’s noticed its strange glow, he says nothing of it. At Rey’s prompting, Luke spins his story slowly, tangentially, as the old are wont to do.

“When I was a younger man, a _long_ time ago,” he begins, light blue gaze wandering out toward the southern horizon, and Rey imagines he is trying to pinpoint the very crags that cradle the sea in their rough arms. “I started a school out there. You could drink the water then. It was… safe.” His story almost instantly shatters into a million scattered asides—the fish they caught there, the afternoons the younger boys spent paddling around in the shallows like puppies, memories of the wildest ones and their antics. Rey allows him to talk for a bit before gently guiding him back. She gets the sense these are stories he does not allow himself to tell often, and to hold them in has worn him over the years.

“There was a time when the gods were terrible and bloodthirsty. New demons were born with every sunset. The rivers flooded and the farmland crumbled to salt and the wars between tribes were bitter, bloody feuds. The divine had grown tired of people, and were ready to reclaim the earth for themselves."

“What stopped them?” Rey can’t keep herself from interjecting.

Luke raises and drops one hunched shoulder beneath his cloak. “There was a war, kiddo. Some of the divine were still merciful, and they fought to preserve humanity.”

“But why would they care?” Rey is well acquainted with a worldview with a more violent tilt to it. She has weathered droughts and famines and floods and bloodshed—there are few, if any, benevolent desert gods.

“I think a handful genuinely feel compassion for us, or perhaps it is pity. But most of them simply understand that they need the praise of mortals to keep them strong enough to hold onto their power.” Rey grimaces. She’s prayed and made offerings countless times, but never had she imagined in those moments that her role in the rites would be regarded as little more than fodder.

Luke gives the goat an affectionate scratch behind its ears as Rey finishes milking it. He continues, “A balance was reached between the gods, but only for awhile. New gods came eventually, new gods that listened close to the stories of their brutal ancestors, who placed no value on human lives. They were the ones to realize the mistake of these old gods, while simultaneously turning away from the gentle balance that had been forged. They learned what was stronger than happiness or wealth or contentment. They began to trade in threats, fear, terror. They turned the balance to darkness, instead of light.”

Here Luke suddenly shifts uncomfortably in his seat, keeping his eyes fixed on a faraway point, where Rey cannot meet them.

“Most of these new gods were harsh and cruel from the beginning, without ever giving us a chance to show them what we could offer them unbidden, without them resorting to threats and cataclysms. But maybe they were right to do so, because others… others weren’t cruel from the beginning. Others learned.” His gruff voice fades, and Rey can see he is unwilling to go on.

“What do you mean _learned?”_ she presses. He has told her too much to fall silent now.

Luke brushes a gnarled hand along the handguard on Rey’s staff, his fingers gentle. Rey thinks he might be breaking off onto another tangent, but she finds it is not one she could easily lead him away from, as he suddenly comments, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen magic like this in a weapon.” He huffs a quiet laugh. “Interesting choice. I would have gone with a scimitar perhaps. But then, I _was_ always overly fond of my Imperial gladius as a young man. Don’t have enough change left in me to learn to wield something like this.”

Rey’s mouth swings open in surprise. Her mind spins, unsure which thread to pursue first: his recognition of magic, his tale of the cruel young gods, or his reminiscing about a weapon that hasn’t been used in at least a hundred years.

He chuckles at her thunderstruck expression.

“I was familiar with magic, once, though this is the first of it I’ve touched in years. My sister is better at it. Her, you’ve likely heard of. Her name is Leia.”

“... the _warrior goddess_ , Leia?” The question feels absurd on Rey’s lips, but she asks it anyway. Luke smiles.

“Our mother was a minor goddess. Her father was a god, while mine was a kind of… demon. He was a mortal once, a witch actually, until he strayed to the study of magics he should never have meddled with. I have his mortal nature, though my mother gifted me with an especially long life.”

All of these revelations about the simple farmer who sits before her, goat milk in his grizzled beard and a sly twinkle in his eyes, have distracted Rey entirely from her initial line of questioning. Luke, however, has continued his story with clear intent, and he circles back around now to their first topic.

“Leia had a son, my nephew. He belonged to this generation of new, vicious gods. Mortals are more precious to Leia than they are to most divines, and she feared for what her son could become if left unchecked. So we conspired together. She would send him with me, to live among the other boys at my school. We hoped he would learn affection for mortals there, as Leia had while being raised alongside me.”

His voice suddenly frays, and he sounds every inch a mortal, no hint of the goddess’s son in him. “I failed him, utterly. I sensed the potential for power in him, but I ignored it. I tried raising him as a boy instead of a god, and he chafed against it. He began to crave the power that others, his _true_ peers, wielded. He must have learned how they became what they are, because one day he sent a dreadful storm that swelled the basin of the sea. Nearly every one of my students drowned in the deluge.”

Rey’s thoughts flash to her last night on the beach, the sea-drenched wind that had nearly stolen her breath, the waves that had destroyed everything she had built, and would have taken her too had she let them. She feels her skin go ashen and cold.

“I shouted curses into the wind from the cliffs all night long, when I saw what he had done. In the morning, when the waters had receded enough for me to emerge, I tasted the first of the salt, and I knew then that I had damned us. The families of each of my students... they were wild with their fury. They flung their own curses, and every bitter word was a handful of salt thrown into the water. I haven’t seen my nephew since."

Luke is staring out to the ridge in the south again, his face far away. But Rey watches the people who mill around outside the open flap of Luke’s tent, their faces friendly and gentle as they enjoy the coolness that has come with the sun’s low seat in the sky. She tries to imagine their faces twisted in rage and anguish—no, their ancestors’ faces, if Luke is as old as he says. She finds it is not a hard picture to paint; she has seen such faces, contorted against her, in Jakku.

The half-god beside her sighs heavily, drawing her attention once more. “He used to send down storms and hold back water in droughts to threaten us, but the people here have adapted over the years, learned to find water elsewhere. No one worships him. No one remembers to curse him either. I don't know if he will someday vanish altogether, or find a way to flood his reach and destroy us all. I may not live long enough to see it, either way."

Luke contemplates her as he hands her staff back. “A witch from Jakku, a nowhere place full of thirsting people. I can guess what you were doing out on the ridge, Rey.” He chuckles softly at her. “I can see what a hard little weed you already are, and I’m sure your roots must run deep in this land to keep you standing. But kid, I’m telling you now," he meets her eyes, "this is not going to go the way you think."

“Forget the sea, forget Jakku. Find somewhere new, and start over.”

* * *

Rey likes Luke, despite all that he has confessed to her. She stays in Tatooine for a time, and it feels almost like what belonging must. And yet, sleep cannot fully find her so long as she lingers on his quiet farm. Besides, she is restless to return to Jakku, anxious to puzzle out a new approach to her goal. She refuses to be dissuaded. She cannot afford it.

It is not until she is halfway through the desert, on her way back to Jakku, that the kind of sleep with which dreams come finds Rey.

She’s back on the cliffs that overlook the sea. It’s not morning or evening now, but midday. The sky burns overhead as Rey opens her eyes, but in an indirect way that lacks the sun’s true focused heat. It’s her first hint she might be dreaming.

Her second one is the beautiful man.

He’s sitting near the edge again, but this time his legs are dangling over the side, and he leans back on his hands languidly. He frowns at her as she sits up, her eyes adjusting to the bright light. Their shadows lie hidden beneath them, and in the harsh light every detail of his sullen face is presented for her examination. At his back, the pale blue sea sparkles with sunlight.

“I told you to leave me alone,” his deep voice grumbles. She can tell she’s caught him off guard again, but he’s less vulnerable and volatile this time, more annoyed and resigned.

She clears the dust out of her throat. “I didn’t do anything!” He raises one dark eyebrow at her, and Rey fights the blush that wants to rise up on her cheeks at her next admission, “I think I’m… dreaming of you.”

If possible, his frown deepens.

The dream fades away before he can comment on her observation. When Rey wakes, she feels as hot and feverish as if it were high noon, despite the cool dune of sand she is nestled in. She swears she smells salt in her nose, though the desert around her is nothing but dark, empty sands. Rey quickly pushes the dream out of her head, rubs the sleep from her eyes and prepares to cross a few more leagues before the sun can start its burning march over the horizon. She has far more important things to be thinking of.

* * *

The next time Rey dreams, she is back in Jakku. Miraculously, she finds her storehouse still standing, but many of her supplies have been pilfered, her clay jugs shattered. She simply shrugs as she hums the command for her sands to knit them back together. She sleeps too heavily for dreams the first few nights, as she works to replenish her supplies and sweep the dust from her floors and her bed.

The next time she dreams, she is back on the cliffs, and this time he is ready for her.

“Why are we connected?” he questions her as soon as her eyes are open. It appears to be evening this time, the hour just following sunset, when the sky is soft and the light fades fast. The sea below whooshes calmly, its potential for catastrophe belied by its gentle, deep blue surface.

She’s busy calculating the change in her surroundings, and she sees the impatience flash across his narrow, pale face like a flash of white lightning as he waits for her answer.

“Why are we connected, mortal?” he repeats, his words stiff with his annoyance and… condescension… and… _mortal?_

“My name is Rey, not _mortal_ ,” she retorts, fixing him with a queer look before returning her gaze to the darkening sea before them. Better not to look at him at all. He’s standing today, and closer to her than he’s ever been (if she doesn’t count the time he pushed her over...). Rey refuses to be cowed by his height, or distracted by his impressive build. His _chest…_

“I didn’t ask for your name, _mortal_ , I asked, what did you do to connect us?” he hisses.

With that sentence, several things fall into place for Rey.

This beautiful man, who always appears to her alongside the dead sea (which seems so much more vividly alive somehow in these dreams of hers...), who feels the need to differentiate her a mortal, must not be mortal himself. If he is an immortal, who else could he be, but the god of this sea? She’d seen it from the beginning, hadn’t she? His salt-sculpted skin and muddy brown eyes, the way the brine seems a part of his hair, twisting it into a work of art…

“Murderer! You’re a… you're a monster!” Rey spits without thinking, hazel eyes hardening in disgust, despite the beauty of the… _being_ before her.

She regrets it with her very next breath—he is a god, surely he can smite her even in her dreams—and her fists clench, steeling herself against whatever punishment her outburst has earned her. Instead, she watches, surprised, as emotions scuttle swiftly across his expressive face. She struggles to catch each one as it passes in the low light, but she swears she sees in him apprehension, regret, fear…

She must be drunk with sleep, because it would be impossible for this hard man, no, this _cruel god_ , who pushed her from these very cliffs and sent a storm to drown her, to feel such decent, human emotions.

A wind begins to blow high up on their shared cliff, building into a keening, mournful wail, and she thinks she hears him whisper, “I am,” before the dream fades to the familiar blackness that she’s come to expect after these visions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The divine!Leia, mortal!Luke dynamic is inspired by the Greek myth of Leda’s egg.  
> Luke’s Imperial sword is a throwaway reference to the Roman Empire, which I just HAD to make, because _Star Wars_ , despite the fact that I have been trying to write this with sort of an Early Persian tilt. Ancient history scholars out there who realize we would be dealing with a chronology that is jumbled on the order of anywhere from 500 to 1,000 years, don’t @ me!
> 
> Thank you so much for the kudos, comments, likes, and reblogs! Hearing from you all puts a huge smile on my face! Thanks for reading, I hope you're all enjoying reading as much as I am writing :)


	3. Chapter 3

Rey begins to fear falling into the dreams. She spends the hours before bed anxious and pacing, and struggles to fall asleep at all most nights. She knows she had to have just imagined the words he whispered to the wind, imagined the conflict and pain in his stark brown eyes.

She remembers with absolute clarity what she told _him_ , however, and she dreads retribution for her impertinence. Surely she can expect nothing less, from a god who would drown children.

_You’re a monster!_

_I am._

Rey understands something of protective magic. She scrounges up some red ochre, whispers a prayer to the desert as she mixes it into a paint. Bright imprints of her right hand go up in rows and rows, surrounding her doors and windows like sentries. She uses her fingers, dipped in a little indigo, to draw a spiraling blue eye on the wall opposite her bed. Her hands look like the sky after sunset for days, but the reminder of the magic only comforts her.

She wishes there was someone she could ask about dream magic though. She knows nothing past which herbs she might hang in her windows to keep away nightmares. She makes a handful of the charms anyway, hangs them like dry little moons to join the constellations of tally marks on her walls. Surely an angry sea god stalking her dreams would qualify as a nightmare...

She begins digging a hole in the sands outside her hut. Rey tells herself she is trying to dig for water, so she can keep practicing the spells she had just begun to unfurl during her time by the sea. Knows there are no aquifers out here, that it’s only an excuse to make herself too tired to dream, should the charms fail. All night her back and her arms and her palms throb hard enough that the pain distracts her from the prickling she sometimes feels on the back of her neck, as if she is being watched by more than just her painted blue eye.

 

Her hands crack and blister angrily from the handles of her digging tools, but then smooth over with shiny pink calluses. She watches the skin on her forearms darken to a deeper shade of gold, the freckles rising up like loaves of brown bread in an oven. Rey can feel herself growing stronger. Digging begins to tire her out less and less, until she can feel the dreams beginning to tug at her in her sleep. They feel stronger too.

Rey switches strategies then. Starts spending her days digging, and her nights tinkering with spells and tinctures in the storehouse. She begins a charm meant to keep strangers out of the hut for the next time she needs to leave. It’s a complex working and keeps her mind well occupied, though the more her exhaustion weighs on her, the sharper the undercurrent of panic that she does her best to ignore begins to stand out in her mind.

Rey knows it’s stupid to pretend she is not likely cursed by what is no less than a volatile, powerful, literal _divine_ , but here, away from his sea, buried in her warm sands and the pungent smoke of her spells, it is too easy not to.

* * *

She lasts one full cycle of the moon before she ends up back out on those jagged cliffs.

It is night here too, a cool breeze curling off the surface of the water. He’s farther from the edge this time, and looking away from the water. Rey can tell he knows she is there, but he takes his time acknowledging her presence. Her muscles ache with the urge to flee. She wonders whether she could run at all, start climbing down the cliff away from him, or if the dream would stop her. If he would stop her. Her pulse thrums in her throat, and she gives a nervous swallow as he lifts his head.

“What did you do to connect us, Rey?” His question is the same one he asked last she saw him, but she’s shocked now by the sound of her name on his tongue, in place of a derisively spat _mortal_. The low honey of his voice wrapped around her name makes her toes curl in unexpected pleasure.

He sits hunched over a small fire he’s got burning in a hollow in the cliff, shielding it from the wind, but he turns a little to meet her eyes. She’s surprised at the calm his face is awash with. He seems... subdued, tired even. If gods could tire. The steady crash of the black waters below seem to mirror his mood, reassuring her there is no storm on the horizon. Yet.

Despite his non-threatening demeanor, Rey can’t bring herself to answer him. What could she say? She’d begun to assume the pull was all him, him chasing after her, seeking his revenge for her trespass, her insolence... Whatever magic she could have worked here was unintentional. Things begin shifting in Rey’s head, plans formulating. When she wakes up, she can go to her workshop, begin puzzling out this curse… she can’t believe she hadn’t tried this immediately...

The god huffs an exasperated breath, tugs a large pale hand through his thick hair with impatience. Apparently gods have humanlike ticks. Rey might have laughed at the realization, if not for the next words out of his perfect mouth.

“I know you’re fighting the dreams. That makes no difference, you know,” His brown eyes, oddly greenish in the golden firelight, pierce her with a knowing look. “You may be able to resist seeing me, but I can see you. Sleeping in your hut, on the floor of your workshop, half buried in your dunes, mortal.” Rey stiffens in horror. He watches the change, and something in his face seems to soften.

“I’ve seen your place, in the sands. So far away. So... dry there. Tell me,” she swears, there is a faint smile tugging at his full lips, “What did you think of my sea? Did you like it?”

He is trying hard not to startle her, she realizes. That mere shadow of a smile on his lips... it's enough to make her own face heat. The expression renders his face that much more beautiful; to merely glimpse it feels like a gift. It makes her want to reciprocate with something of her own. She licks her lips against the drying wind, and his eyes track the movement.

“I didn’t think there was so much water in all the world,” Rey whispers. And perhaps she has seen this vivid dream version of his sea one too many times, has witnessed the many vibrant blues it seems to take on from these cliffs of his, is being swayed at this moment by the low crooning of its waves, which sound as if it they are trying to lull them to sleep. In her dreams, even the bite of the salt seems milder. She thinks this might be a sea of the past, from before the gods were cruel and children had drowned here. Rey thinks she might find this sea beautiful.

But it is dead now.

“I hated it, feared it, as it tried to drown me,” she says, voice sharp as she continues, and watches as his broad shoulders tense below his loose tunic. “As the children you drowned here no doubt feared. As their families now _justifiably_ hate you.”

His brown eyes darken, becoming instantly guarded, but not before she spies a flash of pain lancing through them. “I see you ended up in Tatooine then.”

“You’re a monster,” Rey simply repeats her earlier condemnation of him. She has no more words for him.

The fire between them blows out as if it is no more than a wick in an oil lamp, and Rey swears she hears a sound like a fist cracking against the rock of the cliffs with divine force, before the blackness ushers her away.

* * *

When Rey wakes, she abandons her slowly growing hole to the relentless dunes. She shuts herself in her workshop, and smoke perfumed with myrrh and apricots and oil and date leaves leaks out of the gaps around the door for three days. She doesn’t even come close to sleep in all that time, as she scrambles for a magical solution to her divine problem.

Perhaps because she is awake—and she knows now to watch for it—Rey feels a tug somewhere deep in her skull, a queer sliding sensation that touches a part of her mind she is not normally aware of when she is awake.

And then something in the air changes. She swears she can smell him suddenly in the hut with her, a potent mix of brine and musk and atmosphere that sends her stomach twisting.

She bursts out of the storehouse on a puff of smoke, runs for the dunes behind her hut. The sand is a dull pale brown in the predawn light as Rey climbs and climbs, until her home is no longer visible behind her. All she can see around her are the endlessly stretching desert sands, and the sky that rises in a perfect dome above, painted pitch black and rosy apricot and every color in between.

The desert is the ultimate place to feel alone—Rey knows this all too well. And yet even out here, in the bleak minimalism of sand and sky and nothing in between, she can feel him there. Watching her. For the first time in her life, Rey is not alone.

She should have been more careful of what she wished for.

* * *

Now that she has experienced this strange… bond between them while awake, Rey seems to notice it all the time. Occasionally she growls at him to stay out of her damned head, and sometimes she feels the air around her almost seem to lift and fall, as if he is shrugging his shoulders, telling her _I would if I could._ The only thing that reassures her is each day that passes with no harm having come to her by his hand. Yet it is a paltry reassurance, and she remains carefully guarded. 

She begins weaving herself a new blanket with wool she has been saving since the last time Maz Kenata’s caravan traded with her. She uses the old blanket to drape over the work table in her storehouse. Rey plucks at her tunic and sighs. Since losing her nicer one, this old garment has been taking a beating. She'd hoped to use the material for new clothes, but that will have to wait now. She doesn’t know what he might understand of magic, if anything at all, but she can't take the chance of him guarding against any charm or potion she might manage to create against him.

 

Despite Rey’s best efforts to push the dreams away, they still manage to slip through sometimes.

“You’re a witch,” he greets her the next time she sees him in his world, rather than simply feeling him lurking in hers, and she swears there is a note of admiration in his low voice.

“Did you only just realize that? You’ve been spying on me for eons now,” Rey grumbles through her rising color, and the god frowns. She should be _glad_ it's taken him so long to notice her witchcraft. It means he doesn't understand her workings in the storehouse, despite having been a near-constant presence over her shoulder lately.

The god shrugs, and Rey hates how familiar the motion feels, after weeks of sensing him moving the air of her storehouse _just so_. “I thought you were cooking at first.”

Rey wrinkles her nose. “Who would cook with bitumen, feathers, and turquoise?” she mutters, aghast.

He bristles a little defensively. “Well excuse me. All I've been fed in _decades_ were a few cups of wine,” he mutters. Rey lifts an eyebrow at his admission.

He seems to realize what he’s let slip the same instant she does. His dark eyes shoot daggers at the smirk that is quick to rise on her wind-reddened lips.

“I thought you wanted me to _leave you alone_. But then how will I leave you more sacrifices to accept?” She thoroughly enjoys seeing the guilt flash in his eyes as she calls him out on his hypocrisy. Relishes making him as uncomfortable as he's made her.

The cast of his eyes goes moody, and his mouth falls open to fire what Rey expects will be a retort, but he seems to change his mind at the last minute. It’s evening in this salt-swept world of his again, and there is another fire roaring in front of him, this one bigger than the last. Rey notices how he leans into it, keeping his large hands close by the flames, as if they are cold. She pushes thoughts of those long fingers gripping her shoulders out of her head.

“My favorite was the fire,” he admits quietly, rubbing his hands together, and now she is sure he is warming them. “No one ever thought to offer that before.”

She borrows his favorite motion and offers him a shrug of her own. “I thought it might have been a stupid gesture. Glad to see it hasn’t damned me, I guess.” Her stomach gives a little lurch at the almost-smile that tugs once more at those absurdly lovely lips.

A moment later it twists sickeningly at her realization… if he accepted the wine, and the fire…

“The blood?” she presses, and his gentle expression immediately darkens as he registers the anxiety in her voice.

“... yes.” He seems loath to admit it, as if he thinks it will disgust her, but he confirms her suspicion.

No. No no no no _no_ …

He holds his body tensed by the fire, as if debating whether or not to stand or to leave her her space. Rey struggles to ignore the way the firelight catches on every sinew and muscle in his arms and legs, finally gives up and turns away from him to rack her mind for the right way to break her theory to him.

“So… that question you used to always ask me, how are we connected?” she begins, tentative, wincing as his dark eyes instantly snap with attention to her face. “I think I may know.”

He can’t stop himself from springing to his feet and striding closer at her words; Rey clenches her fists to keep from automatically flinching at his height, at the sudden intensity of his expression. He parts his sensuous mouth just inches from her, then, seeming to think better of it, clenches it shut. The expression in his eyes tells her to start talking, quickly.

“The blood I offered you. It was mine.” She closes her eyes against his sharp intake of breath, not wanting to watch his anger as is breaks against her shore. She can feel him struggling to contain himself before her, like a sky that seems clear but rumbles in the distance.

“You offered _live_ _blood?”_ he finally says in a half-strangled voice, as if he is trying very hard not to yell at her. “Why?”

She may as well tell him, Rey decides. It’ll be that much worse if he puts it together himself later, and she knows now there’s no avoiding this, no avoiding _him._

“I… may have had a plan to bind you. So I could bring water to my… to my village,” she whispers. “I’m sorry, I thought at most it would make it easier to subdue you with spells. I never imagined…” she waves a flustered hand vaguely between them, “... this,” she finishes lamely.

He’s strangely quiet, and still. But Rey knows better than to think he is unaffected by her confession. He’s holding his body as tense as a serpent about to strike out. Rey opens her mouth to apologize again, and nearly jumps out of her skin when she feels his hand clamp over her mouth. She lets out an involuntary squeak—the movement is swift and surprising, but his hand is shockingly gentle against her lips. And cold. She lets out another breath, this one more quiet than the last, and she feels a tremor go through his body.

“Don’t. I’m trying to focus,” he whispers, his voice strained. “I need to get you out of my head… I need to be alone…” Rey gets one last look at his turbulent brown eyes before he closes them. She can still feel his long fingers pressing against her ashen lips when the darkness comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The protection magic Rey uses on her walls are allusions to the [hamsa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsa#Symbolism_and_usage) and the [nazar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazar_\(amulet\)).  
> Initially this was me writing a quick free-form ficlet to fulfill a mythology prompt. Since I'm now clearly committing to making this more substantial than first planned, I've begun a rough outline. At this time, I can see this story going out to about 9 chapters?  
> Also, I'll do by best to continue updating every day, but this weekend I'm visiting my parents and therefore may not get a chance to upload then.  
> Thank you so much for all the feedback and lovely comments, you guys have me grinning ear to ear over here :D


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience with this chapter. It's a longer one this time to make up for the wait!

He manages to keep away from her, in her dreams and in the waking world, for days. Rey starts to wonder if he might have been able to break the connection on his own, once she could tell him what had likely caused it. She ruthlessly quells the sharp, tiny rush of disappointment she feels springing up inside her after the fourth day on her own. The familiar sting of loneliness is a harder wound to leave unacknowledged. 

On the fifth day, a sandstorm begins. For three days it whips, seething, across the desert, blotting out the sun and blasting grit into every available crevice... and sending Rey absolutely out of her mind with enforced torpor.

She doesn’t even consider trying to make the short walk out to her storehouse for spell working though. Rey’s heard of villagers caught in the middle of these storms who simply disappeared into the sands, never to materialize. Others she’s seen in the aftermath, running red with fever and coughing dark sludge from their chests. They always seem to disappear too. 

So she waits, with a mouth full of dust and a belly full of air and gritty eyes full of tears, and after three days, the howling stops.

Rey’s ears ring with the newness, the completeness of the silence as she ventures outside to judge the damage left behind. The red handprints painted around her door have been all but blasted away. The doomed well hole she’d since abandoned has been filled in entirely, without any sign of her ever having labored there. Rey knows by now this is the way of the desert, that one day when she is dead the dunes will swallow up her little huts and her spells and her charms, and there will be no sign she ever was either. 

The thought should comfort her, as one who understands things others do not of the balance of the world—its churning and relentless workings, its dispassion for mankind’s tenacity to leave their mark on it. Dust to dust is the way of it. And there are times, when she wonders if this will be when she finally, truly finds peace, when she will be at one with the greater interconnected force of the world, and no longer so interminably alone. Most days though she cannot shake the whisper that croons to her of some sense of belonging still ahead of her that she might yet attain...

* * *

She is busy turning what was once the well hole into a new grove of date palms when they come. Rey stops in the middle of conjuring a handful of spiny little fronds from up out of the sands. Dusts off her hands on her ratty tunic and shields her eyes against the sun as she watches their approach from the direction of the village.

She hastens to her storehouse, her new warding spell falling in a warm whisper from her lips, when she sees it is a group of men. No good has ever come from a group of men come out here. The women may disapprove of Rey no less, but at least no woman has ever come to do her violence. The few who have visited her had possessed a quiet resignation to her craft. Most had even unwillingly begged her help with charms for sick children or unruly partners. 

The men though... 

One of the faster ones catches up to her before she can reach the mudbrick hut. She pulls her staff from her back and smacks him away from her when she sees his arm stretching out for the gauzy edge of her tunic. He retreats with a yelp, and his brother too, once he catches up and is also sent stumbling. The third, the eldest, manages to hook the staff under his arm when she strikes him, pulling it out of Rey’s grip.

She can see they’re not much more than boys, and yet their faces are chiseled and set with a hatred that seems far beyond their years. The brothers work together to drag her back to their father, and Rey stifles a groan of disgust as she sinks into the sand at his feet.

It’s Unkar Plutt, richest man in Jakku, unofficial chief of the village, and Rey’s biggest detractor. The fat, pale slug of a man is personally responsible for convincing the caravans to avoid her, as well—Rey suspects—as at least one of the burnings of her storehouse.

Several other young men stand huddled around Unkar, their arms shaking as they hold a thick-woven canopy up over his squat little head to shield him from the sun. Despite its shade, his mean, beady eyes are squinted so tight against the jewel-bright desert sky that Rey cannot tell their color. Somehow, they manage to narrow even further when he catches Rey looking at him.

He lifts one bloated hand, studded with bronze rings, and it must be some predetermined signal, because two of the men instantly step forward and land one blow each, backhanding her across either side of the face with all the synchrony of a children's back-and-forth ball game.

“You've truly misstepped this time, witch,” Unkar rumbles as the men return to his side with another lazy gesture. Rey raises an eyebrow but says nothing; her blood is ringing in her ears at the blows, and she'd prefer a moment to recover.

“I lost enough goats and horses in that storm to match what you'd cost me from a slaver at least twenty times over!” he growls.

“And what would you have me do about it?” Rey asks irritably, still smarting but too angry that he is out her harassing her  _ because he lost money _ to care.

“Undo the damage you did! Surely if you can release such a demon of a storm, a little necromancy is not beyond your reach,” he grumbles, sounding petulant.

Rey huffs an incredulous laugh before she can stop herself. Leave it to men like Unkar Plutt to pin their every problem on someone they consider an easy target. Leave it to men like Unkar Plutt to consider a witch powerful enough to raise the dead, but not so strong as to challenge him.

“You and yours are nothing to me,” Rey spits. “I wouldn’t spend the effort to curse you with a sunburn, much less a sandstorm. Now leave my land, before I decide it is worth the effort after all,” she slants the men the cruelest look she is capable to underline the threat, though it is not quite sincere. She’s never conjured more than a breeze. 

The young men flinch back, but Unkar isn’t phased. When they ignore his hand gesture, he steps forward himself, a growl tearing from his throat, and kicks Rey in the ribs. He’s not a strong man, but his great heft is behind the blow, and it sends her sprawling and wheezing.

“A torch,” Unkar snarls to his oldest son, who hadn’t flinched from Rey but who hadn’t moved toward her at his father’s command either. The young man scrambles in a satchel, and Rey listens to him fumble and his father growl his impatience as she struggles to catch her breath.

She feels the heat in the air, a pulse of sweltering energy, when he finally manages to light the flame. Unkar snatches it up impatiently, and Rey watches him waddle toward her storehouse. He turns to them with a leer, holding the flames close to a thick seam of bitumen running along the structure.

“We’ll see what you can do without your abominations, witch. Maybe while they burn we’ll throw you inside too.”

Rey manages to shift to her knees, drawing a pained, ragged breath. Evening is starting to fall, and the temperature with it, but Rey feels as if her blood is boiling in her veins. She is so overflowing with heat, she feels as if she could breathe fire and sweat sparks. Her split lip trickles and she imagines white hot light in place of flat red blood. She feels, for the first time in her life, that there could be something to the talk of her being the daughter of a desert goddess.

Without a word, an utterance, or even a breath of magic. With nothing more than a sudden wild thought from Rey, Unkar’s torch flares to engulf him. 

His scream is an ugly, desperate thing; Rey has never heard anything else so awful as to compare it to. She can see his skin reddening and blistering beneath the flames, thinks she might be able to hear the sound of his flesh beginning to cook too.

The men with the canopy rush to beat out the fire. By now Unkar is lying in the sand. And yet neither the sand nor the heavy fabric can put out the flames. The entourage begin to cry out with their panic.

It's one of the sons who realizes first. He looks at Rey, dark eyes wide and soft with his terror, and he looks very young as he begs her to stop.

And yet, Rey finds she doesn't want to. How many times has she given aid when asked, and then continued to endure the hatefulness of these people? How much of herself has she sacrificed for a sense of belonging that they are intent to refuse her? She's traveled the desert for them, nearly drowned for them, faced down a god for them… for what? For this fat ugly man to threaten her, for these little boys to make her bleed? Rey may not be a demon or a godling or even much of a witch… but she is better than this.

She gets to her feet, despite the sharpness in her chest, and the flames around Unkar leap higher as she curls back her lips in a snarl. Several of the men still trying to beat out the flames take one look at her and flee. Others are taking water from her storehouse to douse him now. One of them is throwing random potions over the conflagration, as if he thinks any magic might undo any magic. 

It's the oldest son who finally stops it. He leaps at her with a roar, and Rey conjures a line of flames between them, but he keeps going anyway, straight through the heat. She feels a jolt of surprise, then pain as his fists connect with her face, and then nothing at all as her vision fades.

 

Rey doesn't quite feel like she loses consciousness. Her mind simply seems to shift to some place that is halfway between dreaming and waking. She is distantly aware of the men scattering, hurling cruel words over their shoulders like stones as they flee. There is a noise in her head like waves breaking, and she thinks briefly of the water god, sees his face flicker just once before her eyes, before her mind is sprawling on to the next dreamlike thought.

When she opens her eyes, no time seems to have passed, though the men have disappeared over the dunes. She could almost believe she dreamed the entire confrontation, if not for the way her chest throbs and her head spins when she tries to sit up. Rey sinks back down into the sand with a groan, then slowly drags herself into her sleeping hut.

She lays on the floor before the door, and watches the sky darken to night. The throbbing in her head has become more intense, and the pain makes it hard to think. It takes her far too long to process that night is coming too rapidly, that the darkness comes from angry storm clouds that have gathered over the Carbon Ridge.

The storm moves quickly, breaking over the desert near enough for Rey to feel the air dampen. The smell of petrichor is so sweet she cannot help but try breathing it in deeply, battling against the tight pain in her chest.

She catches herself automatically mouthing a prayer for rain to reach her, to reach Jakku, before she remembers she knows the water god himself. Rey wonders absently whether he’s heard any of her prayers over the years. Whether he could hear this one now. Whether he was even listening. 

* * *

Rey doesn’t fight the dream tonight—she’s far too tired. Besides, the pull of this one is strangely insistent, stronger than any she’s felt until now.

She opens her eyes, and she’s disappointed to learn than the pain has followed her into this place. And why wouldn’t it? It’s clear these dreams are rooted in reality the way others are not—the reality just happens to not quite be her own. 

However, Rey has to admit, she is not at all disappointed to see him again.

She's likely alone in her assessment she realizes, chagrined, as she meets his sharp gaze. He's sitting close by on a jutting rock, jaw clenched, eyes tight, every tendon in him held tense. She sits up with a sharp, pained gasp, and watches as his long fingers wrap themselves into fists.

Whatever ridiculous, misguided feelings of pleasure she feels at their togetherness evaporate faster than rain before the desert sun. He looks livid. Maybe even angrier than that first night they met.

And no wonder. He’s tried and tried to be rid of her, yet here she still is.

He jumps to his feet when he sees her sit up, his pale jaw working as he strides toward her. Rey flinches at his stormy expression, throws up a hand before he can get closer. He stops instantly, though his fists clench and unclench very deliberately at his sides.

“I'm sorry,” Rey gasps, stumbling to her feet and falling back a step, away from him. His hard eyes track the movement, and his mouth twists bitterly.

“You're sorry,” he murmurs quietly, flatly, but Rey can sense a dangerous electricity to his words. She tries to break away from the churning intensity of his dark gaze, finds herself snagged.

You’re  _ sorry?”  _ he repeats, and this time the anger is a sharp, bright vein in his voice. He takes another step toward her, reaching for her with both arms outstretched, and Rey desperately tries to jerk away. Her body doesn’t move, and for a fraction of a second she feels his hands lightly brush against either side of her face, before the dream shatters.

* * *

She wakes up in the morning swollen and stiff. It feels so strange waking up in a body with so many new hurts that she becomes momentarily lost in it. By the time she eases herself up through the pain and to her feet, the sun is hanging at a different point in the sky. She shuffles to the small pantry in her sleeping hut, looking for water, but finds the men must have wasted it all on the flames.

Rey’s ribs creak and groan as she makes her way outside to check the storehouse. Her breath catches painfully in her bruised chest, and one hand flutters to the wall of the hut for support. 

Rey stares as she catches her breath. Her hand has aligned perfectly with the faded remains of one of the ocher handprints she’d painted as wards. She wonders bitterly whether this all might have been avoided if she’d bothered to repaint the protections. Makes a rude gesture back at what remains of the rows of waving hands. Thanks for nothing.

Her storehouse is a wreck, worse than when she returned from Tatooine. Nearly every clay vessel she’s collected has been smashed, the contents splattered across the dirt floor or missing entirely. Her work table has been overturned, the blanket that had been draped over its surface missing. The charms she’d been working on to use against  _ him _ are all gone, no doubt burnt up in the fire. 

Rey’s heart thrums against her chest painfully at the reminder that the god is still out there, and he is  _ angry at her.  _ She worries the edge of her lip with her teeth, keeping her jaw clenched tight against the overwhelmed sob she can feel trying to burst from her bruised chest. 

She hates the men for the bruises and for their undeserved cruelty, but what may be worse is the stinging reminder of how alone out here she is. There had been no one she could rely on to stand with her against them. Just faded rows of her own handprints—the palest imitations of allies, because the painted shapes aren’t even in the image of another. It’s like counting her own shadow a friend.

There had been no one then, and there is no one now. No one to fetch water or food, no one to help clean the mess in the storehouse, no one to make her a healing poultice or comb a sympathetic hand through her tangled dark hair, no one to offer her a comforting touch or word, no one to even lend a listening ear. There is only the desert, as there has only ever been the desert.

 

The sun is close to setting, and Rey sits listlessly in the sand with her back leaning against the storehouse. There’s a stack of freshly conjured bowls at her elbow, and she works another vessel in her hands with practiced, fluid strokes as she watches the sky change. There is only so much time she can waste on sorrow, too many things besides herself that need fixing.

The aether is as red as a fig’s flesh, the clouds are soft and bright like mountain thistle, and the setting sun warms everything it touches. The heady bloom of the desert won’t last long though. The sands at Rey’s back are already muted in color, and the dark, jagged spine of the Carbon Ridge looks as if it’s been dipped into the emperor’s own indigo dye. 

She brushes the gritty fabric of the vase she’s shaped between her fingers absently, blank gaze skimming across the horizon, when she sees it. A thin golden line, running from the brilliant orb of the sun all the way to the desert sands, like a loose embroidery thread in the emperor’s own tunic. The thread weaves a pattern straight through Jakku. It’s a line of smoke—Rey’s seen such things before. From a funeral pyre.

There’s chance enough that it isn’t him, but Rey can’t imagine the pyre belonging to anyone other than Unkar. She can’t honestly say she’s sorry, but her traitorous mind calls up her memories of their encounter anyway, paints the relevant bits with a rueful hue.

The look in the youngest son’s eyes when he realized she was going to kill his father. And Unkar’s accusations of her involvement in the sandstorm. Rey had counted a handful of golden threads very like this one in the aftermath of the storm, had imagined the howling winds carried its cries from Jakku those nights. How many of those cries had been curses wrapped around her name? How many more would be yet to come, once talk of how she'd dealt with Unkar had spread.

She finds herself thinking, absurdly, of the sea god, and the ancient villagers who'd lined up at his shores to salt him with their hatred. No—she puts him out of her head, before the thought of him can conjure him. Before she can find something between them to call common ground. Monsters do not get lonely in their monstrosity.

Rey watches the tapestry of the sky for a long time, until the golden thread of the pyre degrades to bronze, then silver, then all the desert is swallowed up by the deeply dyed patchwork of night. Only when the moon comes out and illuminates the glittering tear tracks across Rey’s pale cheeks does she stand and return to her hut.

* * *

Rey is… confused when she wakes.

She's lying in a hut that, at first glance, is her own. But once she gets a chance to blink the sleep from her eyes, she can tell it's somewhere else entirely.

A fire is crackling brightly in the center of the room, leaving the walls awash with a warm, comforting glow, but Rey only sets fires in her storehouse. The wall across from the bed is painted with a large, wide eye, but this one is a hazelnut brown, not blue. Beneath the spitting of the fire and her own ragged breathing, Rey thinks she can hear the push and pull of great waves against rock. Her pulse sticks in her throat, and she swallows dryly around it as she struggles to sit up.

Between one blink and the next, he materializes on the other side of the fire. He sits hunched over, mirroring her posture, and while it at least does something to mask the imposing stretch of his tall frame, the movement is sudden enough to startle a cry from her lips.

He makes no move toward her, but those dark eyes of his are following her every motion. When she stills entirely, they simply continue their examination of her. His gaze seems to linger on her split lip. He doesn't make eye contact though, and for this Rey is glad. Those brown eyes are as turbulent as she's ever seen them.

There are so many words on Rey’s tongue right now begging to be given voice. Her sense of self preservation screams for her to start babbling apologies again, to not stop until one sticks. Her rational streak reminds her that apologies had done nothing to brook the tide of his anger last time. The fiery ember of her temper flares a little, craving someone, anyone, to lash out at in anger and frustration. But more than anything, Rey is tired. Tired of worrying, tired of trying to be the right thing for too many people who aren’t her. And so she looks away from him, says nothing at all.

“Are you alright?” 

The words startle her into looking up, her hazel gaze tangling suddenly with his. He’s looking at her lips again. This time he reddens when she notices where he is staring, and quickly looks away, as if he’s been caught peeking at something intimate, indecent.

“I’ll be fine… the others look worse,” Rey murmurs in answer, wincing as soon as the words leave her mouth. She doesn’t know why she said that. Rey’s not sorry Unkar is gone, but she’s not flippant about having killed him either. 

_ Do you think he’ll be impressed with you? He’s not. _

“I saw,” he replies grimly. The fire seems to leap in his eyes, and his fists tighten as if the reminder of what the men had done angers him. That’s… strange, Rey things. But perhaps even stranger is the slight quirk to his mouth that might suggest he _is_ in fact also a little impressed. Rey doesn’t know what to make of any of this, what to say to it either, and the silence between them stretches uncomfortably.

He breaks it once more.

“I…” His fists flex again. “I owe you an apology. Rey. I’ve been harsh, hard to talk to.” He weaves a hand through his dark hair uncomfortably, exhales loudly through his nose. “I could tell you I’m out of practice, but that doesn’t really excuse it. My anger wasn’t for you. I let that feeling take me over though, and I’m sorry for that.”

“Oh,” the sound springs from Rey’s throat, embarrassingly high pitched. She scrambles for something more to say. She can feel his apology sitting in the air between them, and the peace it has brokered feels as if it is spun from cobwebs and air, it is so tenuous, so fragile. Rey is terrified if she speaks, her clumsy words will drag through the whole thing and ruin it. She bites her lip, hedging her response, and his eyes flicker at the movement.

“Are you okay then?” She means to ask,  _ why were you angry?  _ He understands this, somehow, and answers the question she meant to ask.

“It was raining when you fell asleep?” She nods. 

“I sent that storm. It was meant to come sooner, but you’re far away, and it was difficult to pull off. I had to tap deeper into my anger than I have in… a very long time.” He averts his eyes, takes a slow, deep, unsteady breath. It seems to tax him, confessing these things to her, keeping himself in check as they speak.

“Why did you send the storm, if it was so difficult?” Rey asks when his breathing has become more even.

His jaw works as he considers his words. “I meant to frighten those men, to harm them. But I’m slow and weak now, so I was too late,” he says bitterly.

Rey's eyebrows pull together, and she frowns. This confession of his, it doesn’t track. Why would such a powerful being, who's killed more people than she can count on both hands, care anything for a nothing like her?

He frowns back when he sees her expression, sensing her dissatisfaction with his answer.

“I could feel how alone you felt when you came to me with your offerings, how desperate you were.” Rey flushes beneath his piercing gaze, embarrassed at her transparency, but she doesn't contradict him.  “You said you wished to bind me and take me to your village. And sure enough, there is this… connection.” Here he falters in his speech, as if he is unsure of anything past that declaration. That makes two of them, Rey thinks.

“We've clearly both tried to unwork the connection, with no success,” he gestures to the space between them, as if the bond is a tangible thread they might see looped around the jumping fire. “So I may as well lean into it.” He avoids her eyes, stares into the fire instead, and his eyes soften with something like fondness. “I accepted your offerings. I owe you my protection, least of all.”

He hadn't said anything about accepting  _ her _ . His words imply that he is doing this out of duty, a sense of propriety, nothing more. Yet there is some secret cadence Rey can sense rushing below the syllables, some buried inflection she somehow grasps onto. She can sense there is more to his answer.

She thinks of when her head had hit the sand and the men fled from her, how his face had swam up behind her eyes. She remembers the faces in Tatooine after she'd heard Luke's story, and they blend together with the men from Jakku, indistinguishable.

She hadn't asked for this bond. She hadn't asked to be born with power. She hadn't asked to be feared. But neither had he.

Rey raises her hand, extends it slowly alongside the fire, toward the god. Another offering to present him with. And as she offers herself, and watches him focus on her hand with an unfathomable expression, that whisper beneath his earlier words crystallizes into something clear.

He had felt her loneliness then, her desperation, and recognized it for what it was, because it had perfectly mirrored his own.

It starts to rain outside the hut, the sound blending gently with the waves against the cliffs. And he mirrors her once more, this time with his pale, shaking, outstretched hand. Rey gasps at the indescribable feeling that passes through her when their fingers brush together. A tear she hadn't realized had been gathering leaks out, falling across one golden cheek. His own dark eyes are very soft as he considers their entwined hands.

“Ben,” Rey murmurs without thinking, and his eyes voice his question as they slide to meet hers. Somehow, her voice hasn't broken the spell; she can still feel his warm skin brushing against hers.  She flushes. Clears her throat and wets her lips, steals herself a few more precious seconds, that she might give her next words more thought before she gives them voice.

He can’t remain nameless, not now that it is clear there is no going forward one without the other. Not now that she has seen kindness in him. Not now that she has recognized so much of herself in him.

The villagers had named her. Rey. Sun. Burning, hateful thing. Curse upon this land. This god before her may be all of these things and more, but no matter his flaws, Rey cannot bring herself to name another being as she was named. She doesn’t have it in her to deny him what she herself so craves. She’d sooner give him every scrap of love and belonging she’s hungered for these long years all alone.

“Can I call you Ben?”

Surprise flits through his eyes like a flash of gold catching the sun. His jaw works, as if he is silently testing the name, turning it over on his tongue and tasting its flavor.

“What does it mean?” his voice is wary, but his expression is still open to her. Hopeful, Rey thinks it looks.

‘Ben’ is what the villagers call their sons. Son with an o, not a u. A word for someone with connections, someone who is beloved. A word for—

“Belonging,” Rey tells him. “It means... you’re not alone.”

His dark eyes are shining with some feeling so intense it looks on the verge of spilling over. Rey watches as Ben blinks back the wetness and swallows hard. And then he is tugging gently on the hand he is still holding, until he’s raised her palm to his face. She can read the hesitation in his expression, but that fierce feeling is still there too—the gold in his eyes burns with it. Whatever it is, it seems to win out over his uncertainty.

He bends forward slightly, eyes still on hers, and brushes his full lips softly against the center of her palm. Rey feels as if she is going to come apart at the feeling.

“Neither are you,” Ben whispers against her skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Ben" in Hebrew means "son."
> 
> I've now tentatively outlined this out to 12 chapters.
> 
> Within the next couple of chapters we'll probably earn ourselves a higher rating ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> Thank you for reading!!


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